Friday, October 31, 2014

On February 26, I was re-imagining at Mass while listening to the first reading—Isaiah 49: 15:

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!

In the past, when I heard passages like this I thought,

Lovely, God described in feminine terms!

As I listened this time, I thought about the Greek myth I wrote about in the previous post. The myth has the Goddess Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, so that a male god usurps an exclusively feminine faculty. On the basis of this myth, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus justifies matricide (Scroll down to previous post for the story).

With this in mind, I thought to myself about the Isaiah passage:

It’s lovely, except that the Lord is speaking. No one imagines a female lord.

The Judaeo/Christian Lord robs females of their power as Zeus does by his faux birthing of Athena because the Lord never is referred to as “She.” Pronouns tell us what’s wrong with this and many such scriptural passages. When He claims feminine powers, He utterly negates female worth.

Margaret Wertheim: My mother’s Catholicism has been one of the greatest and deepest influences on everything I do.
Tippett: But you also are atheist, is that correct?
Wertheim: [I do not] believe in the existence of God in the Catholic sense. [But] I want to say very publicly I’m not an atheist. . . .
I’m very, very saddened by the fact that militant atheism has become [sic] so to the fore of our society. I think it’s destructive and unhelpful. And I don’t think it does science any service.

I agree and know atheists who agree.

The word “militant” stood out during the interview and came to me in church. I thought,

The Bible contains militant patriarchy.

Wertheim used “militant” to describe atheists belligerently attacking a belief system—quite different from the Isaiah reading about a mother’s love. But the Zeus-birthed-Athena myth and the-Lord-mothers-better-than-a-mother myth both insidiously undermined the belief system in pre-historic times when God was imagined to be female.

Knowing history enlightens the present. Mater Magna, the Great Mother in pre-history embodied feminine powers. If Christianity is to stop being a patriarchal oppressor, we need to pray to Her as well as to Him.

The Lord v. the Goddess October 31, 2014Whenever
I hear of people reading the Bible, I wonder if they read Old Testament texts portraying
the Lord in competition with the Goddess and punishing those who worship Her.
It’s hard not to despise this Lord as a petty, vindictive, unlikeable guy.

Much
is made of monotheism in our religious tradition. It is said to show the
superiority of our religion over the polytheism of others, but it is based on a
misunderstanding. Just as the male image of the Holy One possesses many names,
the female one has a variety of names. In the Bible She is named El Shaddai,
Asherah, Ashtoreth, Astarte, and Anath. Various names for what we call “God” can
lead to greater understanding that images of “God” are merely images and not
the reality itself.

In
the following passages, the Lord looks more like a tribal god or mascot than “God”
(quotations
from the NAB):

Judges
2: 13. The Israelites abandoned worship of the Lord and served Ashtoreth and
Baal. Then “the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel, and he delivered them
over to plunderers who despoiled them.”

Judges
3: 7. Because the Israelites offended the Lord by serving Baal and Asherah,
“the anger of the Lord flared up against them and he allowed them to fall into
the power of [their enemies].

In First
Samuel 7: 4, a similar tale is told, and the pattern appears in numerous other
books.

In
First Kings 15: 11-14, we read that a king of Judah “pleased the Lord” by
destroying sacred objects devoted to Asherah. This also is a common refrain in
the historical books of the Bible. Fortunately, our morality has evolved beyond
the Lord’s jealous code. No matter how foolish the religious objects of others seem
to us, we respect them.

Second
Kings 23 details the destruction of all traces of Goddess-worship in the temple
and the countryside by a king in favor with the Lord. Yet, “the Lord did not
desist from his fiercely burning anger against Judah” (2 Kgs 23: 26). What
follows is the fall of Jerusalem to the king of Babylon and deportations of
Judeans to Babylon—the Babylonean Exile.

Raphael
Patai found 40 references to Asherah in the historical books of the Bible, most
of them referring to Asherim, which
scholars think were carved wooden poles in shrines to the Goddess. They were
everywhere, on every hill, inciting the vengeance of the Lord. In these stories
“Evil in the sight of the Lord” really means competition for Him.

Of
course, the texts do not represent “God”; they were written by Israelite
priests intent on suppressing worship different from their own prescriptions.
Their image of a jealous lord violates our image of what we call “God” today—a
loving, non-judgmental force guiding all peoples toward goodness.

The
Israelite priests largely failed in their campaign. Raphael Patai concludes
that, for almost two-thirds of the 370 years during which Solomon's Temple
stood in Jerusalem, the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple and she was
worshiped by the king, the court and the priesthood.

In
Jeremiah 44:16-19, women tell us why She gave good competition to Him:

We will not listen to what you say in the name of the
Lord. Rather will we continue doing what we had proposed; we will burn incense
to the Queen of Heaven and pour out libations to Her, as we and our fathers,
our kings and princes have done in the cities of Judah and the streets of
Jerusalem.

Then we had enough food to eat and we were well off;
we suffered no misfortune. But since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of
Heaven and pouring out libations to Her, we are in need of everything and are
being destroyed by the sword and by hunger.

First
Kings 11 tells what happened because King Solomon had 700 wives of royal rank
and 300 concubines. These foreign women turned Solomon’s heart away from the
Lord and toward Astarte, and Solomon built sacred shrines honoring the Goddess.
The Lord punished him—for serving Astarte, not for polygamy—by taking away most
of Solomon’s kingdom and raising up an adversary to him.

Earlier
Solomon’s father, David, had massacred all the men of this adversary.

Genocide
stalks the Bible—my subject next time.

November 21, 2014 Genocide in the Bible

Jews,
Christians, and Muslims do not talk about genocide in the Bible, although
educated religious are well aware of it. I think we should stop keeping it a
secret known only to a few. My religious friends who already know this don’t
like to be reminded, but I think it’s important to put the issue forward to check Christian arrogance and apathy.

The
biggest scandal in biblical genocide is that “the Lord” commands the genocide.
He does not fit our idea of God, but he still inhabits scripture readings in
our churches.

The
Lord said to Moses: “. . . I have given him into your hand, with all his people
and his land. So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was
no survivor left; and they took possession of his land.

Numbers
21: 34-35(RSV
translation)

This kind of
slaughter becomes a habit. In another passage, the Israelites
report that they followed
instructions given to Moses by the god called “the Lord”:

. .
. we utterly destroyed [the kingdom of Og], as we had done to King Sihon of
Heshbon, in each city utterly destroying men, women, and children.

Deuteronomy
3:6

Biblical atrocities do not stop with killing people, as this next passage shows. “The Lord” spoke to Moses:

When
you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall drive out all the
inhabitants of the land before you; destroy all their figured stones, destroy
all their cast images, and demolish all their high places.

Numbers
33: 50-52

To
appreciate this we have to imagine an enemy destroying all our churches, all
our statues and other holy objects. The god called “The Lord” makes sure they
carry out his orders:

. .
. if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then
those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your
sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling.

And
I will do to you as I thought to do to them. (Numbers 33: 55)

Joshua,
who succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites, presided over more butchering.

The
total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all
the people of Ai.

Joshua
8:24

More
genocide commanded by the lord occurs in Deuteronomy chapters 7, 12, 20 (“you
must not let anything that breathes remain alive”), Joshua 6, 10 (“. . . utterly
destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded”), and 11. I quit
searching for passages showing the god commanding genocide but ran into many exposing his perverted sexual morality. See especially Numbers 31. Check out these verses, which introduce a sexist
horror commanded by “the Lord”:

Now,
therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has
known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a
man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Numbers
31: 7-8,17-18

The
terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria could take lessons from this lord. Another outrageous passage occurs in Dt 22:

If .
. . evidence of the young woman’s virginity was not found, . . . the men of her
town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act . . .

We
know the likely story. The young woman who lost her virginity likely was raped.
From news of tribal practices in the Middle East today, we know many women are
victims punished for the acts of their assailants.

Come to think of it, to a
lesser extent, this happens to college students today. They are sexually
molested, but their assailants go free and the legal system blames and shames the victims. Come to think further, Catholic bishops did the same thing. This occurred to me after I had finished posting. I write this now in an edit.

We are
told that certain people in history read and studied the Bible, even memorized
large swaths of it. That statement is not followed by dismay over some of its
contents. I don’t understand it.

Here
I have pointed to only a tiny portion of the loathsome passages. I present them
to challenge my fellow Christians who think our religion is superior to other
religions, as our childhood faith trained us to think. It is not. Jesus of
Nazareth left us a treasure of spiritual counsel. It does not insult him to tell
the truth about our religion.

At its
beginning, our tradition beat its rivals, the religions around it. It won the
power to tell its side of the story as the normative one. Because its symbols
saturated the Western world, they provided primary access to the Inner
Realm. Ours is a fine religion. It does what all religions are good
at—providing images for humans to think about inner truths. When it and any
religion insists that its way is the only good way, that’s when it’s
dangerous.We see how dangerous in these
stories about genocide in the Bible.************************Two comments propel me to add this note:

Both
noted that all genocide examples are from the Old Testament, and isn’t the New
Testament more gentle and civil?

Correct. The New Testament IS gentler, more humanist. Most humanist and loving of
all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the Divine Reign within each
human person. One of the responses, however, also mentioned the Crusades, the Inquisition,
the burning of witches and heretics.

As
expressed above, institutional religion’s ideas cannot be trusted as coming
from what we call God.

COMMENT.

Anonymous
said...

Ms. Clancy, I think you would agree that your statement "Most humanist
and loving of all are Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings, which focus on the
Divine Reign within each human person" might more accurately be worded
as "Most humanist and loving of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are
those that focus on the Divine Reign within each person." Those, of
course, are only part of the teachings attributed to Jesus of the New
Testament. He is also presented as believing that the way to heaven is
narrow, that few will make it, and that the majority of humans will
suffer eternally in Hell.
An Old Testament god who orders the death or
enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people is an awful character,
but doesn't threaten hell; far worse is a god (or god/man) presented as
approving--even arranging--the eternal torture of most of humanity.
That's the N.T.'s Jesus, unless you have a convincing argument that such
beliefs were falsely attributed to him in Gospel writings (which I
would read with interest).

November 15, 2014 Tony Flannery

Thank
you to Larry Schug for sending this poem written in New Mexico, thinking it could
go with my post, “The Lord vs the Goddess.” I agree.

Encounter with a Collared Lizard

A collared lizard,

hardly larger than
a dragonfly,

crosses our path,
stops to sun itself

on a limestone
rock in a dry stream bed,

a meeting of
species

that seems
serendipitous, if not predestined,

even in the vast
desert of space and time,

as if my human
life is no accident,

but some sort of
blessing,

not from the God
who lives in churches,

demanding worship
and sacrifice,

but from the
goddess of small places and little lives,

the goddess who
can’t wipe the smile from her face.

Redemptorist Fr. Tony Flannery, founder of the
Association of Catholic Priests has been a popular writer and speaker in
Ireland and has publicly questioned
official church teaching on celibacy for priests, contraception, homosexuality
and women's ordination.

He is touring our country and met with 30 fellow
dissidents in St. Cloud two weeks ago. The discussion was exhilarating, as
indignant views were aired. Few persons there remained silent the whole
while.Malcolm Nazareth nailed the whole
set of problems in Catholicism under patriarchy—assigning all power to an
exclusive group of white males. Referring to texts edited by Paula S. Rothenberg, Malcolm writes,

US culture and civilization is summed up in the term
"Whiteness" or ‘historical, systematic, structural race-based
superiority.’ The roots of racism, sexism, as well as homophobia are in the
cult of masculinity.

By praying exclusively to male lords, Christianity
and Islam have damaged the spiritual imagination of most people on the planet. If
we would pray to God our Mother as well as Father, we would break this pattern
in our consciousness that encourages people to demean women. It leads to sexism,
racism, clericalism, colonialism, and homophobia—all oppressive systems.

There is a clear line from worship of male gods to all
forms of gender violence. The simple elimination of the word “Lord” in our
prayers would break this training and transform the dominant, perverted image
of God in our Western religions. I beg priests to lead with courage.

As Tony Flannery was about to leave he said we were
even more radical than he. I hope we radicalized him beyond talking about
Catholic sexual teachings, the future of ministry, and the problem with
infallibility. I gave him a copy of my God
Is Not Three Guys in the Sky.

Change of topic:

I had never seen the movie or read The lost Child of PhilomenaLee, an Irish woman who spent 50 years searching
for long-lost son. Her journey ends in the exposure of cruelty in a monastery trained
in perverted Catholic sexual doctrine. Having now seen the superb movie, I
speculate that it’s one of those rare movies that measure up to the book.

It happens that an article in the latest NCR echoes
the theme in Philomena: babies inChile were stolen and sold to well-off families.

I
asked Malcolm to write a post for this blog, and I haven’t forgotten my promise
to write about genocide in the Bible. COMMENT:

Chris said...

Hi Jeanette,

Let me first say with absolute sincerity that I am
not posting here for the purpose of trolling. Whenever I visit your
blog, I find myself totally perplexed. It seems to me that your engaging
in a kind of idolatry- an idolatry of, well, unconsciousness. What your
unconscious of is that your subjectivist/relativist ideology precedes
your faith and apparently everything else .

Moreover, most of
the causes that you so fervently pursue are, themselves, ideals that
have their source in that very religion/civilization that you so
strenuously object to. What spiritual universe, other than the West, do
we even find the recognition of things like racism and sexism in the
first place?

Thursday, October 9, 2014

The official Catholic Church would have us believe
unbelievable things about Mary, the mother of Jesus:

that she remained a virgin in spite
of giving birth to Jesus,

that she was conceived without
original sin (assuming it exists),

that she was taken bodily up into
heaven,

and that she was the mother of God
without being God.

In my experience, hardly anyone knows what “Immaculate
Conception” means. I hear it confused with the belief that Jesus had no human
father. To explain “Immaculate Conception,” I offer this text written in 1866:

. . . by the sin of Adam man is conceived and born in sin,
and obnoxious to [the lord’s] wrath, . . . a woman, after child-birth, should
continue for a certain time in a state which that law calls unclean; during
which she was not to appear in public, nor presume to touch any thing
consecrated to God.

She was officially unclean
40 days after the birth of a son, and the time was double for a daughter. (Girl
babies made a bigger mess dirtying . . . what?) For her purification a mother had
to bring a lamb and young pigeon or turtle dove to the temple.

These being sacrificed to
Almighty God by the priest, the woman was cleansed of the legal impurity, and
reinstated in her former privileges.

Even after Mary was declared
immaculately conceived or unstained by original sin, the Church, following
Jewish tradition, celebrated Mary’s purification in the temple after giving
birth. And Catholic women went through the same purification ceremony. This
“reasoning” is so weird, I suspect some of my atheist friends still won’t
understand. Contact me and I’ll explain further.

There’s more for your
entertainment. Doing research for a womanpriest forum, I found apocryphal works
on Mary. Apocrypha,meaning “things put away" or
"things hidden,” were not accepted into the Bible but influenced beliefs.
Those on Mary reveal the origin of Marian doctrines. The Gospel of Jamesemphasizes her exceptional purity.

. . . the priest said to Joseph, Thou hast
been chosen by lot to take into thy keeping the virgin of the Lord. But Joseph
refused, saying: I have children, and I am an old man, and she is a young girl.
I am afraid lest I become a laughing-stock to the sons of Israel.

“the earth opened, and they
were swallowed up on account of their contradiction.” And now fear, O Joseph,
lest the same things happen in thy house. And Joseph was afraid, and took her
into his keeping. . . .

. . . the crisis posed by Mary's
becoming a woman and thus her imminent pollution of the temple. The priests
resolve the crisis by turning her over to a divinely chosen widower.

Womanhood polluting the
temple! Because of her menstruation? In contrast to that patriarchal culture, indigenous
cultures around the world celebrated the onset of the flow, and in some
cultures, men envious of woman’s power to remain strong while bleeding cut
themselves in pretend menstruation. But the Church held Mary to be above
physicality. Joseph finds her pregnant and is “greatly afraid.” Then

an angel of the Lord appears
to him in a dream, saying: Be not afraid for this maiden, for that which is in
her is of the Holy Spirit; . . .

. . . with the departure of her blameless soul
. . . a voice out of heaven was heard, saying, “Blessed are you among women.” .
. .from that time forth all knew that
her spotless and precious body had been transferred to paradise.

Apocryphal writings reveal the
origin of the “Hail Mary.” From the Gospel of James:

Behold, a voice saying: Hail, thou who hast
received grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women!

How did these tales about Mary (rivaling the fairy tale of
shepherds and kings in a stable) develop and why? The answer lies in
pre-Christian history. Around the globe in pre-Christian and pre-patriarchal
times, the accepted God-image was the Great Mother. Several Virgin Goddesses pre-figure
Mary by producing a child without sexual intercourse—Isis, Ishtar (Easter), Inanna, Demeter and others.
The
child, like Christ, often is male, is born at the coming of light (winter solstice),
and is born in a hidden place like a stable or cave. He becomes a powerful
leader. He dies and is reborn (2nd Coming).

When Christianity replaced earlier religions in the Roman
Empire, Mary became the new Goddess. An illuminating moment occurred in 431 at
the Council of Ephesus. In a raucous fight over which title should be given
Mary, Theotokos (Mother of God) won
over Christotokos (Mother of Christ).

The people of Ephesus rejoiced at the outcome because Ephesus was the seat of
Artemis/Diana, “Divine Mother” and “Queen of Heaven.” Diana’s temple became the
church of Ephesus. “Virgin” and “Star of the Sea” (Stella Maris) are more Goddess titles bestowed on Mary.

As these few facts demonstrate, Christianity is a synthesis
of paganism and Judaism. It accepts its connection with one but not the other.

This Sunday, October 12, Mary Smith and I will present a
forum after our Mass.I’ll speak about
the parallels between the Great Mother of ancient history and Mary in Catholic
belief, and Mary Smith will present a model of Mary for us today—not a Goddess
but a woman with attainable strengths to companion us on our journey.
This
frees us to place the Sacred Feminine where it belongs, on a par with the
Sacred Masculine.

October 15, 2014 When SHE reigned

On Sunday Mary
Smith, our priest at Mary Magdalene,First Apostle, and I gave a joint presentation on Mary, the mother of
Jesus. I gave evidence of the parallels between Mary and the pre-Christian
Goddess in apocryphal Christian works and in Catholic doctrines.Mary spoke about the meaning of Mary for us
today—not as a Goddess. Both of us
mentioned the Black Madonna, dark images of Mary appearing all over Europe.

When
the Roman Empire replaced earlier religions with the Christian religion, it
convened councils of bishops from around the empire to decide which form this
new religion would take.There were many
Christianities with a wide variety of beliefs. And there were many old
religions in the empire, devoted to various images of Divinity.

One was Isis,
the mother of Horus, an Egyptian mother/son pair, whose motifs were transferred
to Mary and Jesus. So closely are the two pairs linked that figurines in which
Horus sits on the throne of Isis’ lap were simply renamed “Mary and Jesus.”

The other week I
observed my student teacher, Ryan Snyder, presenting a lesson on Egypt in his World History
class.He reminded me of the period when
Black leaders from the southern part of Egypt ruled—a reminder that the image
of Isis was Black as well as Arabic or Semitic. HEREyou can see the variety of Madonna images, known as the Black
Madonna.Notice the dark African ones.

The
broad scope of religious history demonstrates an irrepressible need for a
divine Mother. Our earliest human ancestors imagined the Holy One female. Extremely
ancient myths and materials tell us that the Goddess was supreme and Her
worship widespread, if not universal, in human societies around the globe
before male deities took over.

Archaeologists
have unearthed tens of thousands of Goddess figurines, from Ireland to India,
some dating back to 25,000 BCE. The oldest known art objects, they depict human
forms with female thighs, buttocks, genitals, breasts, and pregnant bellies—Woman
as the Source of Life. In Myths to Live
By Joseph Campbell comments that they were

dubbed—amusingly—paleolithic
Venuses.

Scholars
molded by male-centered thinking did not know what to think of these figurines.
They could not imagine WOMAN being held up as an icon, leading to their
mistaken opinion that they were erotica. But Charlene Spretnak points to

the
difference between the powerful Paleolithic figures and current pornographic
portrayals of women as coy, vulnerable toys.

Look at some HERE. The figures were
fashioned without feet because their lowest point was intended to be pressed
into the earth for veneration in little household shrines. In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Campbell
comments sardonically that it is

not
unusual for extremely well-trained archaeologists to pretend that they cannot
imagine what services the numerous female figurines might have rendered.

He
volunteers the answer that they provided the same services our male deity
provides: receive our prayers, initiate "meditations on the mystery of
being," aid women in childbirth, guard children, protect farmers, their
crops and cattle, watch over the sailor and the merchant.

Stories
of the female Creator come from Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Africa, Australia, and
China as well as the Americas. Woman as Creator of the universe was a natural
image for primal cultures who saw that woman bears new life. These cultures
were in awe of female power because she could produce a monthly flow of blood
without harming her body, she could grow babies in her body and give birth to
them, and she could produce food out of her own body. Joseph Campbell wrote
that, as the link between sex and babies was not known, males must have seemed,

within
one jot of being completely superfluous . . .

The
female body was experienced as a focus of divine force, and a system of rites
was dedicated to its mystery.

Human
figures of larch and aspen wood are carved to this day among the Siberian
reindeer hunters—the Ostyaks, Yakuts, Goldi, etc.—to represent the ancestral
point of origin of the whole people, and they are always female.

Vestiges
of that ancient reverence for the female appear in our scriptures, as we will see
next time.

Welcome

Interested in religions and spirituality? You've come to the right place.

In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is a two-edged challenge. It invites believers to rethink their dogmas, and it challenges people without faith to rethink their certainty that everything religious is bunk.